Yiannis Antiochou: ‘Endings are our small, everyday defeats’

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There is a city to which Yiannis Antiochou returns in his dreams. It has a low-hung sky, is located near a port, served by a railway station, and inhabited by people he recognizes. It is not Piraeus, where he grew up and lives, nor Thessaloniki, to which he frequently returns. It is a dream city, with streets and stories that run on from night to night. The poet describes it with the precision of someone speaking about a real place. And this is because in his poetic world, the borders between the lived and the dreamed have never been entirely secure.

“At Night I Dream of Endings” (tis nychtes oneireuomai synteleies), released in May by Ikaros Publishing, does not promise revelations about doomsday. The endings spread across its 88 pages are on the scale of a personal mourning, of a relationship that has broken up, and at the same time of a freedom that is being curtailed on the quiet. Concurrently, they engage with the consequences and dimensions of wars, of historical amnesia, and the violence we observe on our screens. This is his first new poetry collection since “The lower sky” (autos o kato ouranos, 2019), which won the Greek State Poetry Prize in 2020; a selection of earlier work has been published in the interim under the title “Body” (Soma, 2023). He insists that each book is born of its predecessor, as he “does not write standalone accounts, but the ongoing narrative of a life.”

It is a life divided between two seemingly incompatible ways of observing the world. On the one hand, his long career in the healthcare sector, where precision, organization, and responsibility toward the patient leave no room for ambiguity. On the other hand, poetry, which shatters syntax, condenses time, follows shadows, and dwells on unanswered questions. His language is becoming increasingly pared down as he gets older, he says, and along with it his needs and certainties—even his desire to prove anything.

For his latest volume, the painter Leda Contogiannopoulou provided the illustration on the frontispiece and Dimitris Athinakis undertook the editorial oversight. For Antiochou, who grew up with books in which poets conversed with painters, this collaboration allows the image to serve as a “preamble to the preamble”. It is also why the reference to Seferis, Cavafy, and Jenny Mastoraki does not read as a display of erudition, but rather as a way of positioning his work within a literary lineage.

As we speak, I am surprised to hear him return on several occasions to a phrase that seems paradoxical for a man who has dedicated his life to the written word: “Poetry does not console.” And this, I believe, forms the core of his new collection. The ongoing search for an explanation with this admonition running through it: never grow accustomed to the things that happen to us—neither those that are lost inside us, nor those we see leveled with our own eyes.

How does ‘Endings’ grow out of your previous work? Is there a continuity that runs through your books?

At the end of every book, the next one is born out of its remnants. Which is why I also published “Body”: I wanted this linear narrative to be clearly visible. I don’t profess to be writing a single poem my whole life long, but in a way that is what I’m doing. I write the narrative of my life by observing myself in the world. In itself, my biography is of no interest to the reader. So I try to make the poetic subject a person in whom they can recognize something of themselves.

What are ‘endings’ to you? And where do they intersect with dreams?

Endings are not events of cosmic proportions. They are small, everyday defeats: our dead, our loves, what we have lost, what changed us. An ending could be a personal disaster writ small. But it can also be what is happening in the world today—nightmarish events we observe from the comfort of our homes. Then the dream steps in to transform this lived anguish into a poetic narrative. I am not writing about some future Apocalypse. I am writing about what is already happening.
You speak about your dreams as if they have their own geography.

Since I was a small child, I have been having dreams with a continuing, ongoing narrative. I have my own dream city, with people I meet over and over, with routes that repeat. I wake up, remember, and when I go back to sleep, the story continues. I call it “promnesia”, something like déjà vu. The low-hung sky, the city near the port, and the railway station that recur in my poems do not correspond to a real place. They are elements of this inner cartography. I do not know if they belong to the unconscious or the subconscious; what I do know is that they form part of my experience.

Which endings worry you the most in today’s world?

First, I see people losing rights they thought they had secured in perpetuity. I also see myself becoming a slave to my work, of my own “free will,” working endless hours. That is how you lose your children, your partner, your very life. And then there is the historical revisionism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the violence against Israelis and the exponential scale of their retribution, the casual way in which new bombardments are discussed. It terrifies me that we seem to have forgotten the lessons of two world wars. It’s as if we’re watching new spheres of influence being carved out—it’s Yalta all over again. Information is everywhere, but knowledge is not the same thing as information. I fear younger people won’t have the tools they need to understand exactly what is being repeated.

At the beginning of our conversation, you used a verb you coined yourself, meaning something like “to experiencify”. What does it mean to you?

“Empeiriono” may not exist in Greek, but it’s a word I need. It means that I accept or welcome an experience, that I return to it and recognize its reflection within me. The darkness that’s present in my poetry is a darkness I have turned into experience. A darkness I have lived and internalized. I could utilize my own trauma through poetry. But these dark things you encounter in my poems are not a constructed reality. The people wandering the streets, whom I meet in hell and amidst all those dark landscapes, are real. They are figures I have met in my life. So, it is not a darkness I invent in order to write. It is something I carry within me, something I have known and continue to recognize through poetry.

Your language often seems to shatter, as though it’s reached its limits. Is this a way to capture this dissolution?

I believe that a personal voice has taken shape, without my meaning it to, over time. I don’t know if it’s down to the words or the syntax—it’s probably both. I have noticed, in my recent books, that my language is narrowing, becoming harder, more abstract. Which is not an attempt to make an impression on my part. It’s just that language falls short for me to express what I perceive as reality or hyperreality. In a way, I live in the Platonic cave: I see shadows, not the objective truth. The splintered language is a way to convey this experience and the sense I have that space and time are not as impermeable as we think.

You have said that poetry does not console. Cavafy, in “The Melancholy of Jason Cleander,” turns to the art of poetry for the ‘narcotics’ it supplies. Why would you deny it this function?

Poetry opens a window; looking through it, you understand you aren’t the only person who has made mistakes or suffers. In this sense, yes, it can console. But it does not dull the pain, nor does it make you a better person because you are a poet. The greatest trap lies in making an aesthetic object of the other’s pain, to the extent it starts to exert an appeal. If my poems do this, then I am not a good poet. I want neither to exploit pain nor to write militant poetry.

And yet, wars and political violence are at the very heart of the collection. How does this reconcile with your refusal to engage?

I am an observer and a chronicler of my time. I record what is happening, nothing more. I do it to stop us getting used to it. So we don’t end up viewing violence and the restriction of our freedoms as normal. I grew up in an Athens I remember as free— and now see things I could never have imagined we’d be discussing again in the 21st century. I can’t pretend I don’t see them.

There is an insistent search for the sacred in your work. What can the sacred mean in our time?

I don’t believe it will disappear. No matter what strides we make in technology, no matter how far man travels, he will always wonder what it is that holds our world together, and what exists beyond his understanding. For me, the question of God and the sacred is as open as the universe. Even non-believers frequently defend their disbelief with a near-religious zeal. Because our need for the sacred is not negated by scientific discovery.

How did you and Leda Contogiannopoulou come to collaborate creatively?

I grew up in the Athens of the ’80s and ’90s, when poets and painters were engaged in a vibrant dialogue. I remember books by Ikaros, Agra, Ypsilon whose frontispieces were anything but incidental. When I saw Leda’s work from the home of George Seferis at the Benaki exhibition, I was moved by the way she transmutes reality. I wanted her to read the poems and create an image for the book. She came up with an interior filled with objects, books, and vessels that also allude to my own adventures in hospitals. It was as if she had captured the archaeology of my memory. A preamble to the preamble. That is why I consider the ongoing encounter between poetry and the visual arts to be so vital.

You say the book doesn’t seek to be understood, but rather to be “included”. What are you hoping to awaken in the reader?

I don’t want them to look for a single explanation. I have left anchors in the book, points where the reader can pause and unlock something of themselves. Life teaches us that we do not experience things as uniquely as we believe. Love, fear, loss, the senses are shared human experiences, however differently we may react to them. This is also a lesson in humility. The poem shouldn’t say “look what a fine thing I’ve written”; it should leave room for the other to exist within it.

You have referred to Seferis as one of your teachers. What does his poetry teach you still? And how important is it for a poet to engage with History?

Seferis is my teacher. Reading his “Days,” reading his “Essays,” one understands that behind the grievances and grumbling of the diplomat there is a man who writes staggering things. A man who has understood the reality of life because he existed within History, played a part in crises, watched on as things were lost and won. And this man has understood why he has to be precise in his poetry. Therein lies a crucial lesson, I think. When you resolve to expose yourself to the reading public, to open the postern gate of yourself, you must incorporate History, too. Your personal experience is not enough on its own. What matters is how you perceive it in the real world. I often think of Seferis and Cavafy— about why it seems strange to us that they handle History in kindred ways, through examples, figures, events, and historical poems, and why these two poets will continue to demand our attention. Because their poetry is not detached from the world. It contains it.

At this stage in your life, what has changed in how you view life and writing?

I’ve come to realize that people shrink as they grow older. I don’t need the big house or the best car. I have more than I want, which is also true of the words in my poetry. I only want to publish a book when it is better or different from its predecessor. I have lived a rich life; I am satisfied with what I have been given. I don’t feel the need to cash in on a prize by retreading what I already know how to do.

What comes next, after “Endings”?

I would like to publish my essays in a few years’ time. I am glad I have Ikaros and people I trust at my side. But I hope I don’t write another book soon, just so it exists. It would be easy to repeat a mastered mannerism. But I don’t want that. When you know that you are and are not a poet, your attitude toward writing changes. I don’t have time for fripperies.